Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The ASV Roboat has made a name for itself in many robotic sailboat competitions, and now a real research project is in store for the Linux-powered vessel.

According to the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week. The report which cites sources close to both companies, comes as the 27th of January deadline for the Commission's decision approaches and suggests that the official announcement of the successful acquisition will be issued in early February.

Architectural Web site Arch Daily points to a design competition at Open Source House for individuals or teams to create a eco-friendly sustainable single-family house for a specifically designated spot in Ghana. The contest, which runs until May 15, 2010, encourages designers to "think big" and come up with ways their initial designs can be implemented on a larger scale.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article on free games for Linux and thought it was time to write a bit more on the subject. Actually, I had a lot of fun doing the research for this article and telling my sons that I really was "working." I don't really play that many games, so when I do, there are a few things that I look for.

The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it's paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabrielle took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.

As free and open source software becomes more and more a part of mainstream computing, it is common to find large commercial organisations taking a big interest in FOSS projects, sometimes to the extent of taking over such projects.

Via Technologies announced a 2.36 x 2.36-inch computer-on-module (COM) based on its new Mobile-ITX form factor. The Via Epia-T700 is built around a 1GHz Via Eden ULV processor with 512MB soldered DDR2 memory, and supports the development of ultra-compact embedded devices in medical, military, and in-vehicle applications, says the company.

Disney has announced that it has released the Ptex "Per-Face Texture Mapping" library as open source under a BSD license. The code, which was used for "virtually ever surface" on the animated feature film Bolt, has been integrated into Pixar's RenderMan Pro server. Ptex's major feature is that it removes the need to carry out manual assignment when "UV mapping" textures to remove seams and joins, a process which is often regarded as one of the more tedious parts of creating 3D animation.

Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.

The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0, is finally out, but only one operating system has native support for it: Linux.

Does GNOME 3.0 necessarily need 3D acceleration? Do GNOME 2.0 apps run under 3.0? A website tries to provide answers to some unsettling questions.

The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd. KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.

LXer Feature: 18-Jan-2010

According to Reuters, MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius is now looking to China and Russia for help in his campaign objecting to the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Previously, Widenius appealed to the European Commission (EC), which initially objected to the takeover, in order to prevent the deal from going through, however, Widenieus believes it now seems clear that the EC will approve the deal. He points to the petition on helpmysql.org, a campaign site set up by Widenius, which he says has over 30,000 "signatures" from MySQL users from around the world.

A highly anticipated release, KDE 4.4 has taken necessary steps to solidify the underlying Plasma technology of KDE 4 and add polish to the already shiny surface. This week, MakeTechEasier will take you on a preview of the upcoming KDE 4.4 release, scheduled for February 9. I recently installed Release Candidate 1 on my desktop computer and took it for a spin. I was not disappointed. The following is a preview, not a review. KDE 4.4 is still under development and should not be used on production systems, nor should stability be expected. Having said that, I am typing this article within KDE 4.4 and loving all of it, especially the tabbed windows.

A notoriously creepy Malthusian thinktank appears to have provided the inspiration for the design of Google's new web browser, Chrome. The icon for Chrome seems to be little more than a holistic logo of The Club of Rome. Both logos appear to have formed spontaneously at around the same time. The Club of Rome appears to have debuted the logo for its "New Path of World Development" programme in June 2008, while Chrome unveiled the browser with a comic in September 2008; an example of the Hive Mind, surely.

LCA 2010 - Day 1. January brings with it the southern-hemisphere's summer and Linux.conf.au. This year, the conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Capital Cabal, a team of volunteer organisers lead by Susanne and Andrew Ruthven.

The Groovy-Eclipse developers have delivered version 2.0 of the plugin for developers who want to work with Groovy and Java in the Eclipse IDE. The new version is the culmination of work which began in May 2009 to create a more integrated, incremental compilation process. This has resulted in what the developers call an "almost completely rewritten" plugin.

While we don't normally talk much about ReactOS, the free software operating system that was started some twelve years ago to provide binary compatible with Windows NT, there is a new proposal to abandon much of its Win32 subsystem that has built up over the past decade and to create a new Windows subsystem that in large part is derived from Wine code.

Linux, Mac and Windows install instructions on site.